If I were a Manileño reading the Daily Tribune last Wednesday, I’d be worried about any relative I may have in Davao City. According to the newspaper, the city’s residents are living in terror because of the actions of communist insurgents who were being coddled by Mayor Duterte himself and his “boys” (what, no girls?) at the City Council. In fact — and this was the lead of the story — the Council had just declared two staunch anti-communists, party list Reps. Pastor Alcover of ANAD and Jovito Palparan of BANTAY, personae non gratae, proving, said some anonymous sources, that the city government is “into coddling enemies of the state, which makes them also enemies of the state, as they appear to allow the communists to engage in their activities unopposed and given free rein to terrorize the city residents, while barring those who fight these enemies of the state.”
Alcover
Palparan
Unfortunately for the Tribune, the City Council made no such declaration. Zero. Nada. Zilch. And it‘s not like they had no reason to do so: Alcover and Palparan, after all, have been on the propaganda trail over the past months in Davao City, declaring that the city has been practically overrun by communists and that the city government was not only looking the other way but was actually supporting the rebels. But for actively trying to bring down the city’s image, all they got was a threat to be invited to the City Council session to explain their actions. There has been no mention of declaring them personae non gratae, and even if there were, nothing official has been done about it.
Where did the Tribune get its story, then? Apparently, from House Speaker Prospero Nograles himself, whom the paper engaged “in a brief telephone interview.” Here’s a direct quote from the Tribune website:
Nograles
The camp of Speaker Prospero Nograles yesterday slammed the Davao City Council for recently passing a resolution declaring Reps. Jun Alcover and Jovito Palparan persona non grata in Davao City.
“What is this move from the City Council, declaring the two party list congressmen persona non grata? They are congressmen. They have violated no laws — even in Davao City, yet the incumbent Davao executives have declared that they are not welcome in Davao where they also have their constituents they want to serve,” Nograles told the Tribune in a brief telephone interview.
“Being the Speaker, and the leader of the House, I must protest the treatment given by the Davao executives against two of our congressmen, who certainly do not deserve this kind of treatment,” Nograles added.
“Whatever else is said of these congressmen, they have served their country well, and declaring them persona non grata in Davao City is the height of ingratitude.” (Read the entire story here.)
Councilor Peter Laviña told me that Nograles, who is running for mayor of Davao City, was “caught lying because he was directly quoted in the story in a reported interview.” He also said the Tribune “made a fatal error in not verifying the story.” Indeed, it would have been easy for the newspaper to verify if the City Council had made such a move: all it needed to do was make a phone call to the office of Vice Mayor Sara Duterte, which is listed in the official Davao City website. A simple Google search would have led it to the needed information.
Laviña actually registered his protest and sent the following email to Tribune publisher and editor-in-chief Ninez Cacho-Olivares:
Dear Ninez,
Kindly be informed that the City Council of Davao has not passed any resolution declaring Palparan and Alcover as “persona non grata.” Your news is totally wrong. It has no basis.
Nakuryente ang Tribune. Truly unfortunate that the newspaper I admired for political activism fell victim and used as a tool for political propaganda.
Please be careful next time in entertaining press releases from partisan quarters.
Maraming Salamat,
Councilor Peter Laviña
As Laviña said, journalists call this sort of thing kuryente, or electricity. More to the point, we call it nakuryente, or electrocuted. The Tribune was electrocuted, and the Nograles camp has a lot of explaining to do for feeding the wrong information to the newspaper.
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